


smoke

by cicadas



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Superstition, Symbolism, Trust Issues, War, a divide between snafu and merriell, sharing meals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-04-23 10:14:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19148983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicadas/pseuds/cicadas
Summary: Shelton exhales smoke. Eugene breathes in. The push-pull of the tide takes place on dry land, right there between them.





	smoke

**Author's Note:**

> dia duit, mo chairde  
> anois...this was initially a little tidbit about snaf not eating his food and giving it to eugene instead, but then it turned into some kind of prose about colour and good luck/bad luck. ambiguity covering the whole bloody thing. do with it what you will, and hopefully enjoy it in all its abstract inconsistencies. x

He throws his bag and boot on the bunks when he first sees him. It isn’t important he knows their names, or their titles, or duties. Just that they don’t come near him.

One of them answers the question he wasn’t the one to ask, and he looks up to see that sickly pale Alabama skin and a soft, wispy haircut. Red. He’s heard stories of gingers. Bad luck, he reckons. He flicks his eyes up and down his floppy uniform when he knows he’s looking, and turns his attention back to the sore on his foot.

-

He sees him again. Like it’s easy to avoid anyone in the goddamn camp. Sees him at chow, eating with the fellas he was with the first time, like he doesn’t know better than to spread himself out, not get too comfy-close with whoever he’s been lumped in with. Don’t matter if he’s fighting with them or not.

He lines up for an A-Ration, knowing it’ll be the last nice thing he eats before they ship out the next morning, 0500.

He brushes past the boy - cause that’s what he is, a boy at war, trying to be a man, like all of ‘em - as he walks back to the end of his table, and ignores the turned head he gets in response. He doesn’t want that red hair in his eyesight before he turns it down to eat. Might spoil the meal.

-

He can feel the weight of C-Rations in his pack, a burden on his back. The round cans take up space and the food inside may as well be rotten for how it tastes. Six cans. Six units of space. Six times he’s gotta open a tin and his mouth and nick his fingers on metal. Lick up blood and give a bit of copper to the flavour of whatever’s inside. M-Units with some kinda veg, B-Units with tacky pound cake or hard biscuits. He hands those off in return for a cigarette or two - Lucky Strike, though sometimes he’ll get a Pall Mall or a Marlboro, and it’s a nice change to his limited diet.

He starts sitting by him when they eat, telling himself it’s to watch him struggle with the meagre tasks most guys had the hang of within the first week. His hands are soft and long and his limbs are gangly - neck sleek, skin taut over his jaw and cheekbones and his forehead big but covered by that damn unlucky hair.

His fingers slip around his P-38, sweaty and unstable from nerves or pure incompetence, and Merriell finally feels that human part of him cave.

“Trade ya,” He says, holding his hand out for the can held tight in those shaky fingers.

He sees the distrust in his eyes. A wary, wily thing he recognises better than his own mother. Better than his reflection. He flicks his fingers, and slowly that can is stretched out and given over, a bit of whatever briney, salty juice is inside slipping out onto his fingers through the tiny holes that puncture the tin lid.

He gives his over, a rightful trade, and that same wary look is in the boy’s eyes when he dips his spoon in to eat.

“Thanks,” He says around a mouthful.

He nods, feeling distinctly like Merriell, accepting it. “You better learn to use that thing quick, boy. Not many folks ready to trade they food so quick ‘round here.”

He gets a nod of acknowledgement back, and he tucks his elbows inward to lean forward and peer at the metal clanking around that slim neck.

“You’s Eugene, huh?”

He nods once more, but he doesn’t look up again. Merriell leans back, turning his shoulders outward and tilting his jaw up to the sky the way he does, and says, “I’ll commit that to memory, for sure. Yoo-geen, only soldier who don’t know how to open a goddamn can ‘o franks ’n’ beans.”

He hears “Fuck you,” on a soft breath, but it don’t have much bite. He chews on his bottom lip, smiling.

“Yeah, your hands’re far too soft to hold anything other than that fine silver, ain’t they?” He probes, just to hear that same huffy, pissy breath leave those dry lips.

“You gonna eat or not?” Eugene angles his shoulder at him, eyes hidden a bit by his helmet, and the question is meant as a ‘cause I’m sick of you flapping your mouth at me’ but it’s the first time he’s been asked to eat since a CO pulled rank on him at basic.

It’s not an order, and not one he’d be able to give anyway, but it has Merriell stabbing his knife into the join of the side and top of the can, piercing it good and proper so he can pry the metal up.

The hidden eyes leave him, and he turns his eyes down to his own hands, where metal meets metal, and thinks of the red under his skin.

Merriell licks the inside of his cheek with his tongue, poking it out, and shakes his head.

He eats the meat, tosses the can beside him without reprimand and lights a smoke. The damn redhead has the means to smile at him through the cloud of grey, and Merriell feels more like Snafu in that moment, because the only thought that crops up at the sight of it is to tell that fool boy to get that smile of his damn face. Ain’t nobody gonna be smiling back at him once the mortars hit, and the gunfire starts up again. Nobody’s gonna be smiling at him when they take his life out his body with all that bad-magic-red he’s got in him.

He quashes the hate and the ‘aint’s’ and the sickness in his body, and sucks a hot, heavy breath deep into his lungs. He commits that smile to memory along with the name, ‘cause then he can at least see it at night, on the backs of his eyelids when he tells himself he’s sleeping, and imagine it somewhere else. In a different setting - somewhere nice, with a sky that doesn’t threaten to drop death in them at any moment and a ground not filled with bodies and holes.

“You had meat stew, by the way.” Eugene tells him, and damn it if a smile of his own doesn’t threaten to curl around his cigarette filter.

-

He starts calling him Gene after that. Maybe to tease. Maybe for some kind of familiarity. Maybe cause he likes the way it feels in his mouth; how it sounds when he speaks it out loud. He hasn’t decided yet.

Maybe he’ll get his damn head blown off before he decides, then he’ll taste that copper outside meal time, biting his tongue.

For some reason, Merriell decides that isn’t going to happen. He stashes two of his B-Units in Eugene’s pack during a quiet moment, and it eases that pressing pulse in his temples and wrists and those fuckin’ tubes leading right to his heart. One’s blue, he knows that for sure. Don’t remember what it means, but one’s blue and one’s red, and he’s sure the distinction is important. Red is bad luck. Half his heart beating the colour of his blood, pushing the pulse through to his head, feeding him thoughts of a certain person clothed like all the rest of ‘em. He isn’t sure why the distinction needs to be made. Blood’s all the fuckin’ same when it’s on the outside of you. Don’t do good to dwell on it.

Dont do good to dwell on superstitions, either. Red blood, red hair. Ain’t no proper connection at all.

-

“Snafu,”

He turns. Ignores. The dirt crunches and the rocks bite his skin.

“Snaf, you go through my pack at all today?”

 _Why the fuck would I touch your pack when I got my own to worry about?_ Shelton turns about on his tongue. He doesn’t say it out loud. It’s nearing a point in the night where it’s not good to lie, and he doesn’t wanna risk losing potential sleep that may be heading his way by disrupting that rule.

“Cause I got an odd amount of rations, and you got none.”

That has him turning, sliding his forearm off his eyes and blinking up into the vast expanse if nothing that is the night sky. Can’t see the stars yet.

“You touchin’ shit that ain’t yours, Gene?” He rasps out - mean, angry, rough; Snafu. It sounds comically weary to his own ears.

Eugene just scoffs. “Have _you_?”

He shrugs, unseen, and slugs his arm over his face again. “Took yer’ smokes as payment. Thank me when your belly’s full.”

He shuts his eyes. Tired, weary, stupidly concerned Merriell. What would his mama think, worrying himself with such a boy. What would he himself think if he weren’t so deprived of anything else to focus on. It’s just his luck he gets put in the vicinity of a pretty boy. A pretty thing is something the eye will wander to if there’s nothing there to distract him from it. That’s all he needs. A distraction.

Eugene has become both the object and the distraction, and Merriell's focus on him has been keeping him fed. 'Sides, hunger is an old beast he knows well and way back. Makes him angry - even when he does eat, the damn C-Rations make him angry - and anger fuels his trigger finger, trains his eye on the men that have them out in this goddamn fucking country. The men he’s gotta kill to get home. Hunger means more tin cans weighing down the pack of that fool redhead sharing his foxhole, keeping him alive just that bit extra. He needs it more, being raised on _more_ , having things like lunch and supper and folks ‘round for tea with pitchers of lemon-aid’s and shit like fruit in their water.

Now he’s drinking from a metal canteen like all of the rest of ‘em, but it doesn’t mean he’s gotta suffer more. Merriell closes his eyes under the flesh of his own limb, warm and alive on his eyelids. Passing off a meal in a tin can is a weight off his conscience knowing it’ll be eaten by a stomach that’s aching for it.

The gnawing begins as he starts to drift off, and he hears the changeover of watch emphasised by the crunch of dry crackers. The rabid dog in him snaps and craves for something between its teeth. Snafu tells it to shut up. Merriell hopes for some kind of sleep. Neither get what they want, but Eugene is in a better mood the next day (he’s been staring more, eyes brown and living still, but something mean behind them now. It ain’t a look Merriell likes to see none too often.) It makes it worth it - if he’s busy moping, he can’t kill Japs too good, can he?

_-_

“You gonna eat?” Eugene asks him, poking tiny holes with his P-38 into a shitty K-Ration they’d been handed out only a few hours before when the supply truck finally caught up with them.

Merriell pokes his finger into the tip of his knife, the blade sliding between his finger and nail and resting there like a threat. Same knife edge as the tone in Eugene’s voice, creeping in there steadily each time he has to ask.

He runs his tongue over his teeth and feels indignant.

“How ‘bout I don’t? How ‘bout I get shipped off early with some bony-ass legs and a spinny head. Can’t fight if there’s no fight in you, huh, Eugene?” He drawls. The knife digs in a little too hard, and he feels it break the skin in that sensitive place. He winces.

Eugene looks at him, giving him that blank stare he gives everybody else, and turns away. “Don’t say shit like that.”

Snaf smiles, a mean thing, and it comes across as a bearing of teeth. “You gon’ miss me?”

Eugene’s face hardens, but his eyes don’t. “Eat your fuckin’ chow before we start gettin’ shelled again. You may not get a chance to get out of here alive, and if you do it ain’t gonna be on a stretcher cause your heart’s given out.”

The phrase makes Merriell straighten. His heart. Does he know about the colors in him, too?

Eugene must catch his eye, cause he sighs in that annoying ‘I know this why don’t you’ way. “Malnutrition causes irregular heart beats. Main cause of death in people who ain’t got food to eat. Heart gives out.”

Merriell’s brows come together. “Know a lot about this, do ya?”

“My father’s a doctor.”

He hums. Father’s a doctor. Father with a full belly and a full pocket is the all-knowing in what it’s like to not have food on the table coming home after work at thirteen. He’s gonna listen to that, of course. Snafu is the dog in him, biting at his stomach lining.

“Tell your daddy to come treat me for my heart when I’m in that nice hospital bed eatin’ their burgers and checking out them nurses’ asses.” He says.

Eugene ignores him. He deserves that, he will admit. Still eats the extra B-Ration he put with his things - chocolate caramels in this one - and there ain’t any talk of heart problems when he swallows them down, tongue clicking at the stickiness.

No, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know the grain-based breakfasts, stuffing him up for a day out working, coming home after dark even when summer drags the sun out longer in the sky, dried sweat on his brown skin, blood and blisters on his still-soft child’s hands. He’d grip his spoon and feel the sting.

He’s never sat down with his sisters and asked that question of if they’re gonna eat. Never had to hear, “Not tonight, my baby,”. Never cursed his father for living, not loving, then leaving. Putting a hungry dog inside him and not teaching him how to hunt.

“Here,” Something nudges his side, and Snafu wants to lash out and bite.

But it’s him again, always him, by his side - always, always around - and he relaxes so minutely, just enough to take the twinge from his neck but not enough to get him killed, and he peers out into the faded daylight.

A chocolate caramel, dusty white and cracked-looking, is resting above his hip, pressed in by those skinny fingers. Not so white any more. Been marred and scarred up by hits and misses and blood and mud. The dirt seeping into him.

“Go on,” the hand insists. “S’the last one.”

He takes it gingerly, scared he might bite, and says thank-you.

It’s the most he’s been polite in months, and for a second it shocks him - this unprompted, home-soft talk. He tosses the candy to the back of his throat and chews down with his molars, sticking the top and bottom of his jaws together. Must be that same magic in him, seeping out and into their shared environment.

Must be his hometown self digging his way up through the hardened layers he has now, hiding under the green uniform, still green himself. The boy who would look at the sun and feel it soak into his skin like a living thing, hugging him from way up where he can’t ever touch. A touch of good luck, touch of light. Bright white in the sky, that turned to yellow, orange, _red_. Eugene taps his boot against his exposed ankle, absently, like they’re friends at some park sittin’ down and watching the sky move. Reminding him he’s done things just like that, and might do them still.

He’s getting to him more and more, and he’s letting him. He’s comforted by it. Bad luck, good luck - caramel teeth and searching fingers. He hasn’t been shot yet, and neither has Eugene.

Eugene with red hair.

Shelton kicks him back a little too hard, but he just laughs, and the sound causes a few idle heads to turn with their brows tucked down. He gives them a look, and they retreat, but Eugene, back to them all, keeps his smiling eyes on him.

Snafu, Merriell, all of him at once.

He sucks down the chocolate layer and longs for a cigarette. Something to fill up his lungs and cloud up his head. A bullet’d do fine. Maybe the fire’ll start up again, and he won’t have a choice. It’s only a matter of time. He looks up, but the sun’s been obscured by that same cloudy smoke that’s taking up the sky coming from the west. The direction they’re headed. Tomorrow, the next day, whenever the lines are strong and the orders are given and they’re told to start moving.

-

At night, he takes off his rain poncho and covers Eugene’s legs where they try to curl up under him. The rain tapered off an hour into his watch, and it stops the fool boy shivering.

In his sleep, his father tells him he’s gone soft. The words don’t hold when he wakes up with his helmet half-off and his poncho back over his shoulders.

-

If it were ever about colours, Merriell thinks he himself would be blue. That one big blue pipe in him, right in the middle of his chest. Some bones or a plate of a bone and some kinda mush in the way, but under it all and among it all, there it is. Working in tandem with the red one to get that lifeblood all 'round the rest of him. He pokes holes just to see it sometimes, to make sure it's still working - that his heart's still beating and he hasn't been shot and killed, bled out in some got-damned foxhole with no shock of bad luck near him to blame it all on.

He's the blue of the sea. Eugene is like blood in the water. He doesn't belong. Shouldn't ever belong in a place like this. Even as his hands and feet harden up, marred in places where the islands have dug in too deep and torn something out of place, scar tissue making up for what it took.

Droplets of red in an ocean too large and unforgiving to ever return it. An ocean swells and swallows rain and ships and hosts home to many things, but give back it does not. Shelton exhales smoke. Eugene breathes in. The push-pull of the tide takes place on dry land, right there between them.

-

Some night, one night, they lean closer into second-hand smoke, a candy on two tongues in a different kind of sharing, and the spit-sugar slides down his throat like that communion wine he never tasted in his own religion. Eugene would’ve. He’s seen that bible tucked into his breast pocket, never leaving even in that deep, loud fire and mud. How does he compare to that watered down preacher’s water?

In the night, he figures water looks quite like wine anyways. Colours don’t stand out as much without the sun to bare all at each eye that happens to be looking. When the moon’s up and the sun goes down into wherever hole it hides in, it takes all the colours with it. Maybe it takes that damn bad luck from Eugene’s hair along with it, too.

Don’t matter much. If he knows one thing, it’s that the borrowed superstition he carried over from home hasn’t shown one lick of truth so far. Eugene’s pushed and shoved and dragged him through enough to warrant himself free of any voodoo notions that may’ve been struck up on his head when he was born.

-

The foxholes are quiet at night. Have been since the flares stopped, usually shooting up bright and orange just to keep them awake.

He’s with him in one, large and smoothly dug. Always together lately. Firing, shouting, eating. How his motives have changed.

They share a smoke, scratching fingers with uncut nails and brown dust in small cuts, and the filter goes from dry mouth to dry mouth like it’s being kissed twice-over. With no-one around to see, their colours blend together, dissipating in grey.

Drops of blood in that wide ocean. Holy wine on a waiting tongue. Ready to sin and be forgiven each week. He’s pretty sure that’s how that goes. Man in a white robe with a book and a sash tells him he’s clean now, son, and he can go on doing the same things over and over long as he knows it ain’t any good. His soul will suffer for it. Their souls are suffering out here, away from the tall spired buildings those white men live in, so he can do that job for him.

He writes a prayer for him in that bible; messy, self-taught handwriting and blended Cajun French. Something for him to read when he’s feeling truly lost, and his God ain’t enough to get him through. When those stares he gives really have that fully-bloomed hate behind it. A hard heart covered up by what he’s seen until he can’t remember what it feels like to have something beating up against his ribcage - like they share that dog, trying to break out with its teeth and claws.

That tame dog, once, now a coarse-furred wolf with a taste of what foreign blood is like.

He writes that, too. Then the scratch of désolé, right in the seam, like it was accidental that it be there at all. Slip of the pen, smear of ink. Some kinda half-assed apology for things he hasn’t done.

Eugene exhales into the night when he’s supposed to be sleeping. Merriell puts the bible back when his eyes close, and watches him flick a few pages past his one when he goes to write next.

-

“What’s it mean?”

Merriell holds the barrel of his gun in a tight closed fist.

“Keep your fucken’ eyes out there,” Snafu tells him.

“It ain’t English.”

Hot from recent fire, burning his flesh through the calluses.

“You gon’ get us killed. Gonna get me killed for lookin’ out for ya,” Merriell tells him.

Its enough of an explanation as is. Eugene turns back to his position. His spine is three distinct bumps from the base of his neck going down, hidden in green. His hair is covered by the helmet that hasn’t left his head for days.

He wants to see it. Touch, and feel it in his fingertips again. Absorbing his bad luck into his whole self till there isn’t a distinction between them anymore. Whose death belongs to who. Whose hate, whose killing, whose desire to cause harm. Whose wolf, tooth, claw.

Eugene fires a bullet to his side, and the yelling continues from whenever it stopped. Merriell cowers into himself, and Snafu starts firing. He doesn’t stop till he sees the last few stop twitching.

-

They wash the blood off their bare bodies in the ocean. The salt stings cuts but heals them, too. Merriell lies on his back in that salty sea for as long as he’s able, naked and bare and open to any weapon that wants to come crashing down right through his fleshiest parts.

Hands find those places, long, slender, toughened up, in a spot way-down-there on the shoreline. He dips his own in pink-red marks that have marked up the skin he spends hours staring at, and watches the water from the ocean slide along his fingertips and onto the deepest red of his wounds.

Gene winces, but he isn’t in pain.

They aren’t in pain out here. They can leave that to the selves they own when they’re uniform in dirt ‘n borrowed blood. Blended colour that’ll never wash out right.

-

He doesn’t tell him what it means.

After some time he forgets what he wrote, or that he wrote it at all.

He feels that red in him when he sweats, and his heart beat is a loud thud in his ears. Feels it rush up and down him, searching for the blue. Searching for the smoke that turned them both grey.

Across an ocean, he feels the pieces of themselves on the beach, in the dirt, in the water. He lets himself feel it, then he raises the axe, reaffirms his grip, and brings it down. The wood splits easy under the pressure.

He continues till the job is done, and his blisters have broken up and there’s blood on the handle of the tool. Spilled out like it has a thousand times before. Bright red.

Merriell places his axe down. Sweaty and sun-hot. Freshly cooled in salt water. Eugene’s hair splayed out in his lap on the beach; a part of him that never left those islands.

Red and blue, they sit and watch the tide come in.

 


End file.
